On the Fiddle

The Fiddly Bits

Adjusting each of the lines so that they are fair takes a fair bit of time because they have to be fair in all three views. With pencil and paper this takes more hours than you can count as you try a new curve and erase the old one only to find that some other line is not fair because of the change you made.

This takes much less time on the computer. Each curve has nodes where they intersect with other lines,

The blue squares are the nodes. Each of these nodes can be moved to adjust the curve. I use this little gadget to determine how far to move the node.

The concentric circles are 1/8^th inch apart and at the centre is a reference point. I put the reference point on the curve I want to adjust,

and move the node an 1/8^th inch at a time until the curve looks right.

Then of course you have to transfer the new intersection to the other views and adjust those curves. After about a half hour of fiddling I got to this.

The lines are all fair to one another and the flow aft is smooth. In the next post I will show you another set of lines for this same boat which took only two hours to do from start to finish and I'll tell you how I did it.